Max characters in textarea with jquery

Question

I have the following code, and I'm kind of stuck on what to do next. The idea is when you enter text into a text area a counter tells you how many characters you have left. Once you get to the max characters I want to stop allowing characters to be entered, or delete all the characters that were entered so there are only 10 characters in the text area. I know I have to put the code where it says alert("LONG"); but I'm not quite sure what.

var maxLen = 10;
        console.log("Start");
        $('#send-txt').keyup(function(){
            var Length = $("#send-txt").val().length;
            var AmountLeft = maxLen - Length;
            $('#txt-length-left').html(AmountLeft);
            if(Length >= maxLen){
                alert("LONG");
            }



        });

Solution 1

Here it goes. Anything beyond character limit will be removed.

$('textarea').keypress(function(e) {
    var tval = $('textarea').val(),
        tlength = tval.length,
        set = 10,
        remain = parseInt(set - tlength);
    $('p').text(remain);
    if (remain <= 0 && e.which !== 0 && e.charCode !== 0) {
        $('textarea').val((tval).substring(0, tlength - 1));
        return false;
    }
})

Check working example at http://jsfiddle.net/JCehq/1/

Solution 2

All of these answers are a bit odd in that they try to do a little too much. A simpler and visually more pleasing way (because it shows the text quickly being cut off) - and with with less oddities that the previous example (note how it overwrites the final key?) - is to simply cut off the number of characters on keyUp to the number that's allowed.

var maxchars = 400;

$('body').on('keyup paste', 'textarea', function () {
    $(this).val($(this).val().substring(0, maxchars));
    var tlength = $(this).val().length;
    remain = maxchars - parseInt(tlength);
    $('#remain').text(remain);
});

Note that this then also works for pasting in text, as some of the examples above don't.

Example here: http://jsfiddle.net/PzESw/5/

Solution 3

Returning false and using .keypress() instead of .keyup() stops input once the length has been reached. Here's the example in a jsFiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/p43BH/1/

Updated to allow backspace.

Solution 4

Got it with this:

$("#div_id").prop('maxlength', '80');

I really dont know if there's something wrong with this solution, but it worked for me.

Solution 5

A simple way to do this is to set the text in the textarea to a substring of the full amount. You can find an example here:

http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/javascript/form/limit-characters.html

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